Adobe releases a free public beta of the next version of Photoshop

Photoshop is the premiere photo editor, considered the gold standard for those who want to get the best out of their images. Unfortunately, it’s also priced that way, with a list of $699. Yeah, there are various discounts for upgraders and students, but regardless, this software doesn’t come cheap.

But for a limited time, you can get Photoshop for the lowest price possible – free. Adobe’s working on the next version of the software and has released a public beta of Photoshop CS6. If you’ve always longed to give the program a try but lacked the coin, this is your chance.

Note that the download is a substantial one. The Mac version is almost a gigabyte, while the Windows version weighs in at 1.7 GB. On both platforms, you can run the beta release of Photoshop CS6 alongside older versions of the software. It will not overwrite your existing Photoshop installations.

You won’t need a serial number to use the beta (when installing, choose the option labeled “Try / I want to try Adobe Photoshop CS6 for a limited time”. You will need to sign up for an Adobe ID if you don’t have one.

And there’s good news for Windows XP users who increasingly see high-end software that no longer works on that aging operating system: the Photoshop CS6 beta will run on XP, so long as it’s got Service Pack 3. You can find more details about installing (and uninstalling) the beta here [PDF].

Veteran Photoshop users will find that the CS6 release has undergone a facelift, with a darker skin and a layout evocative of Adobe’s consumer version, Photoshop Essentials. Besides the visual changes, there are other interesting features. From Adobe’s Photoshop CS6 page:

Content-Aware Patch — Patch images with greater control using the newest member of the Content-Aware family of technologies. Choose the sample area you want to use to create your patch, and then watch Content-Aware Patch magically blend pixels for a stunning result.

Blazingly fast performance and a modern UI — Experience unprecedented performance with the Mercury Graphics Engine, which gives you near-instant results when you edit with key tools such as Liquify, Puppet Warp, and Crop.* Plus, a refined, fresh, and elegant Photoshop interface features dark background options that make your images pop.

The Content-Aware Patch feature is the most interesting feature to me, but according to this hands-on piece from The Verge, it doesn’t work as well as it should in the beta:

“Content-aware move” is a new tool in CS6 that lets you move an object within an image and intelligently fill the space it previously inhabited in just one step. For example, you can select a cat on a rug, click the content-aware move tool, drag the cat to another spot on the rug, and release. CS6 simultaneously moves the cat and fills in the area it previously inhabited (based on context). If you did a poor job selecting the object you want to move, CS6 feathers the edges of your selection once it has moved to its new spot. In our tests, content-aware move worked pretty poorly; results always required touching up, especially if the image’s background has any degree of complexity.

While PS is indeed the Gold Standard for image editing, it is by no means the only very powerful choice. I have been using PaintShop Pro for…well, since 1.0? in the early 90s? and find that it does more than I need for professional results (and yes, I sell my photographs). Layers, etc all are in there. The biggest shortcoming is the support community, PS has so many users and they share readily. PSP support is very good, but it just isn’t as big of a community.

Most folks I’ve talked to over the years say the PSP is much easier to learn than PS, and usually at a cost of under $100 (often discounted to under $50) the few shortcomings are not enough to make us move over to PS. But if you are starting out, I recommend starting with PS so that unlike me, you don’t have so much to unlearn if/when you do move over.

I liked Paint Shop Pro, but it lost me about version 8.0. It bloated up badly.

When I’m working in Windows, I now use HyperSnap from Hyperionics, which is actually a screen capture program but it has just the right image editing tools for day to day use. If I need bigger guns I haul out Photoshop, but HyperSnap does most of what I need, and is fast/light to boot.

On the Mac, OS X’s Preview also has the basics I need. A lot of Mac users don’t realize that Preview has some decent basic editing tools.

Photoshop is nice, but, for the few times a year I would use it, it is overpriced.

If Adobe sold it as a download only for $70, I would buy it. And Adobe might sell 10 times as many copies making the Adobe the same gross, increasing their market share, and challenging their competitors.

As it is, anyone with knowledge of torrents can get an older, hacked version for free in less than 5 mins. (Don’t argue with me whether it is right or wrong, the fact is that it can be and is done, just not by me.) Sell Photoshop at a decent price and maybe it will cut down on that, too.

As it is, I go over to a friends house and use his copy when I need to edit something beyond what I can do with open source software. It’s certainly cheaper, even with the price of gas! lol

I wonder how well Adobe is doing with the subscription pricing model they announced not long ago. With the proliferation of computing devices, i.e. a person might own a smartphone, tablet, laptop and desktop, the one software license per machine model of doing business they have traditionally used seems like a sure way to go out of business.

The new Adobe Creative Cloud looks interesting to me and is targeted at professionals. I think they see that asking a user to shell out $699 per license per machine in today’s world is not only greedy, but foolish.

Kids growing up today are buying apps that do amazing things for a couple of bucks a pop, then whine in the reviews that they aren’t free. Your software had better be better than a Holodeck filled with dancing Orion slave girls if you want to charge $699 per.

Agree that Adobe would probably do better if they’d cut the price of Photoshop by 90% and sell it through the App Store. They’d need to get ten times as many customers for that to be viable. I think they’d get more than that but it would be a HUGE roll of the dice for Adobe management. I doubt they’ve got the courage.

However, $700 software is hard to swallow in this day and age of inexpensive apps. For example, iPhoto on the iPad was just released and it totally rocks. It may be the very best app ever released on iOS bar none, and it costs just $5. You can’t do all the nifty edits that Photoshop provides, but you can do a lot of them and it is really slick.

For OS X, it’s hard to beat Pixelmator. It offers 90% or more of what Photoshop brings at an absurdly cheap price ($30 according to the Mac App store). Disclaimer: I don’t work for them or get kickbacks or whatever – just a fan.

For those complaining about Photoshop’s price, please consider that the $699 version is the professional-grade product. It has far more features than any typical home user needs. Indeed, it has more features than many self-identifying professional photographers. Home users are not the core market, and anyone suggesting that Adobe should cut the Photoshop’s price to ~$100 need look no further than Photoshop Elements. The full install of Version 10 is ,a href=”http://www.frys.com/product/6796415?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG”>$99 at Frys, and contains all the features any casual user will ever need.

If you still insist on free software, look into alternatives such as GIMP, GIMPShop, or Paint.net. All three are free, and are suitable alternatives for basic-to-middle image editing.

With respect to professional photographers, many of them are leaving Photoshop for another Adobe product: Lightroom. Lightroom is geared more toward photographers, who specialize in a relatively small set of Photoshop’s full capabilities; and it does a good job, too. Power users, graphics industry professionals, and the like will continue to use the full-on version of Photoshop for a number of reasons. 1. It is considered more of an enterprise-level application, not really meant for home users. 2. As such, the company usually pays for it. 3. They already have workflows set up around Photoshop scripts. 4. Photoshop integrates seamlessly with other industry standard software (After Effects, Premiere, etc.).

The argument that a $10 Photoshop will make up the cost in additional users is based on false logic. Adobe have been doing this for many years; I presume they understand their market fairly well, and have designed and priced their software suite accordingly.

Companies that continue to demand consumers pay for one license per machine are going to lose. People just own too many computing devices these days and want their software to work across the board on all of their devices. And the app store model has set a new bar for how things are done and is taking us in that direction.

I’ve been using Adobe products in my work as a news photographer since 1996 and I would like to see them stick around. I hope their suits don’t run them into the ground. I greatly admire their software and hope they succeed.

@davesmall: Very interesting idea. Cutting the price that much does sound a bit too aggressive to me.

You may be correct in that the subscription model and multiple-platform computing is the future, but I don’t think that necessarily goes against my argument that the full professional Photoshop program was never intended for the home user. I just see too many people complain about the steep price, while also talking about how infrequently they use it. There is a reason that Photoshop Elements exists, and it is intended for those very people wishing for a $100 version of Photoshop.

Interestingly enough, I can buy Plants Vs. Zombies for the iPad, but I note that the same program won’t run on my computer or Playstation. I would have to buy the program for each device. I suppose I could also load the iPad version on my iPhone, but does that raise another question about the way individual licensing works today?

If Adobe charge $699 per license, and if a design studio installs the program on 6 machines, how would Adobe make up the difference with a subscription for the entire office? I presume the subscription price would have to be such that Adobe would be able to make a profit after an average prescribed time frame. In other words, does the monthly subscription price work out to roughly the per-month cost of a given version of Photoshop before the next upgrade?

I just looked at the subscription pricing. I see that a 1-year subscription for Photoshop is $35/month (month-to-month pricing is higher). That means a $699 single user license (which is in theory good indefinitely) is roughly equivalent to 20 months on the subscription plan.